Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Co.Comments Shutting Down

In November 2008, I made my CoComment Co.mments Switch and now just received a notice that Co.mments is shutting down. Argh. Given that the reason for the switch is that I wasn't happy with CoComment, what should I use now?

Disqus comment system is AMAZING. I use it on my personal blog (tofugu) and my company blog (eduFire). It's really great for getting discussions going on blogs, and has a really pretty interface. I haven't seen that many 'blogger' users use disqus, though I know it works on blogger. You should definitely check it out.

Disqus looks really cool, but it doesn't solve the problem I'm going after unless I can get the rest of the world to adopt it. What I need is something to remember where I've left a comment and alert me when someone follows up.

I used Commentful before co.mments, after CoComment became too flaky to be usable (which happened much sooner for me than for you!). I'll be back to Commentful probably for the time being. It at least is stable and reliable.

The biggest drawback for me with commentful is that it doesn't put the full text of the comment into the RSS feed. Basically it's just a notification; you have to go to the original site to read the comments. Better than trying to track manually though.

Thanks, Tony! Actually, since writing the above I've followed the suggestion above to try out BackType. It looks like it will probably serve my purposes well. I don't care about subscribing to people's comments en masse, but like co.mments you can subscribe to an individual post using a bookmarklet. I think it will work. The only downside I can see is that they don't always recognize the blog. (But there is another bookmarklet you can use to submit a blog for addition to their crawled blogs.) So, I guess I'm happy.

About Me

Dr. Tony Karrer works as a part-time CTO for startups and midsize software companies - helping them get product out the door and turn around technology issues. He is considered one of the top technologists in eLearning and is known for working with numerous startups including being the original CTO for eHarmony for its first four years. Dr. Karrer taught Computer Science for eleven years. He has also worked on projects for many Fortune 500 companies including Credit
Suisse, Royal Bank of Canada, Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan,
Universal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Fidelity
Investments, Symbol Technologies and SHL Systemhouse. Dr. Karrer was
valedictorian at Loyola Marymount University, attended the University
of Southern California as a Tau Beta Pi fellow, one of the top 30
engineers in the nation, and received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer
Science. He is a frequent speaker at industry and academic events.